RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/27/did-americans-come-to-love-big-brother/

In less than a month, there will likely be no more President Trump for the media to obsess over. No more false stories about him overfeeding koi fish or headlines screeching that Trump told Americans to inject bleach to combat COVID-19. No more Trump-fixated media worries over how to best accentuate bad news and downplay good. 

There will be no more frenzied mockery that Trump was lying about a vaccination delivery date in 2020. Instead, imagine a happier world of 2021 where Dr. Anthony Fauci is the genius behind the vaccination. Joe Biden is the master logistician who inoculated the nation. And COVID-19 disappeared with Trump to Mar-a-Lago. 

There will be no more news blackouts of the first lady, no more snide suggestions that the elegant and quite stunning Melania Trump lacked the beauty and grace of Vogue cover star Michelle Obama and the education and academic authority of Jill Biden.

There will now be no more media bombshells about “Russian collusion” mythologies. There is only the effort to downplay the real, frightening, China collusion narratives. And they involve U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Hunter Biden and the Biden family, and a host of American corporations, universities, and multibillionaires. Nothing to see here, move on.

There will be no more anger over Trump’s use of the term “China virus.” There is only the deadly suppressed truth of the COVID-19 virus that originated in Wuhan, and Beijing’s outright lies about the virus ensured its spread and lethality. No matter, troublemakers. Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg will reassure us that a non-authoritarian China did as well as it could. 

There will be no more media “walls are closing in” frenzies that Trump is crazy and should be removed under the 25th Amendment. There will be only the underground whispers that he seemed a lot more hale than incoming President Joe Biden. 

The real question is not how or even whether the media can exist without its obsessions with Trump, but what will it now do with Joe Biden? To put it another way, the media assumes that its creation of a new fake hero can become even more believable than the construct of its old false villain. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/fact-checking-fact-checkers-jack-kerwick/

The so-called “Fact-Checker” is a persona that 2020 appears to have brought into its own. Everywhere we turn now, it is impossible to avoid tripping over some self-styled “fact-checker” or other. 

It’s not difficult to notice that all self-proclaimed “fact-checkers” are invariably left-leaning partisans whose only interest is in “fact-checking” the claims of those who challenge the agenda of the Democratic Party.

Of course, the reality is that the moniker of “fact-checker” is of a piece of the fiction that journalists are objective, disinterested, impartial observers and “reporters” of current events who are invested in nothing other than disseminating “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Or some such patent nonsense as this.

In what follows, I will make my first go as a fact-checker, only a fact-checker with a twist: I will begin fact-checking the fact-checkers, both their claims and those of their fellow partisan ideologues.

Here, I will focus only upon the biggest claims of 2020, namely, the claims regarding…“The Virus.”

The Claim:

COVID-19 is a novel virus that scientists have isolated.

Rating: FALSE!

In order to determine whether a virus exists, it must be isolated, purified, and extracted from the bio-chemical concoction of stuff in which it is alleged to have been located. 

This has never been done with COVID.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/arrogant-righteousness-west-bruce-thornton/

The recently passed $2.3 trillion bill to provide Covid-19 relief programs and fund the government, as usual contains billions of dollars for feeding whole herds of Congressional legislative pork. One of the most egregious is $10 million to fund “gender” programs in Pakistan. Nothing bespeaks our continued misunderstanding and dismissal of Islamic doctrine and practice than this arrogant program that violates fundamental precepts of sharia law.

Such blindness is nothing new, but has characterized our government’s assumptions that guide policies involving Muslim nations. Under the guise of “respecting” Islam instead we insult observant Muslims by assuming our secular, technocratic, globalist paradigms are the default ways to live for the whole planet. But our smug righteousness and certainty reaffirm for traditionalist Muslims our spiritual poverty and ultimate moral fragility.

Like nearly all Muslim majority nations, Pakistan’s constitution encodes sharia law, the totalizing guide and authority for every aspect of human life. One product of this code is the social and juridical inequality of women. And many of the dysfunctions like honor killings and legal inequality that this ill-conceived $10 million program seeks to eliminate derive from these strictures. That’s why Pakistan is ranked second to last in sex equality. Given this simple reality, how successful can any program be at correcting sexist laws and customs predicated on deeply held religious beliefs?

Such myopia has for four decades impaired our understanding of the Islamic world. First our foreign policy establishment misinterpreted the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Trapped in the postwar anticolonialism narrative that peoples once under the thumb of European powers or the U.S., who installed illiberal autocrats to do their bidding, would rebel against those leaders in order to enjoy democratic freedom, economic opportunity, and full national sovereignty.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-meet-your-frenemies-in-europe-11609103726?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Biden administration is committed to restoring normal service in U.S. relations with Europe, but the truth is there is no “normal” left. The European Commission talks of a “new trans-Atlantic agenda for global change,” but the European Union is also rushing to complete a trade deal with China. The incoming administration finds itself at odds with the EU over trade and investment. The Biden crowd should ponder one of President Obama’s favorite lines, “The world is what it is,” and respond with as much realism and as little idealism as possible.

Trans-Atlantic relations may improve in tone, but their content has changed and was changing long before Donald Trump entered the White House. The Cold War ended three decades ago. The fruits of that American-led victory include a liberal, democratic and peaceful Europe. The worm in the apple is that the Europeans can act independently, whether as individual nations or in concert through the EU. The more independent they are, the less they want advice from Americans.

The post-Cold War divergence of American and European interests is usually attributed to the George W. Bush administration’s response to 9/11: the bungled interventions that set off a human wave of migrants and terrorism in Europe; the hostile behavior of the Department of Homeland Security, which remains a powerful disincentive to visiting the U.S. All true, but deeper processes were already at work.

The full quotation, from V.S. Naipaul, is: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” In 1945, most of Europe was nothing but rubble. By 1990 Western Europe had remade itself under American supervision and protection. The EU has since expanded to 27 states and sought to secure a place as an independent node in a multipolar world.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/531632-trump-signs-relief-bill-despite-criticism

President Trump on Sunday signed the government funding and coronavirus relief package, the White House said, averting a government shutdown and delivering economic aid as the pandemic worsens.

Trump signed off on the $2.3 trillion package from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., days after he expressed displeasure with the spending outlined in the omnibus and complained that the coronavirus relief measure should include direct payments of $2,000 per person, up from $600.

But the delay came after Trump single-handedly brought the government to the brink of a shutdown and unemployment benefits expired for millions of Americans Saturday as the bill went unsigned.

Trump has visited his golf club in Florida each day since arriving in the state on Wednesday and has made no public appearances. He did so again on Sunday both before and after signing the legislation.

“I will sign the Omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed,” Trump said in a statement upon signing the legislation. “I will send back to Congress a redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill.”